Current State of Development (June 15th 2018) — more blockchains!

As outlined in our blogpost about our strategy on community updates, this blog series shows what we are currently working at. It will give you some insights on specific questions we are dealing with right now and also on our overall progress.

Last time we featured some thoughts on grouping, this time we will tell you something about the different blockchains we feature with Unibright.

Unibright is blockchain agnostic — meaning our tools create smart contracts for different blockchains without any coding! Nobody knows which protocol will make it long term, so we decided for a high level approach: The user visually defines his business processes and all needed technical objects are generated automatically. If there will be a new protocol with great features in some months, the Unibright processes just remain as they are and by the push of a button the smart contract code is generated for that new protocol!

As stated in our roadmap the main development target for Q3 2018 is to add more templates and more blockchains. We started with Ethereum and already added Hyperledger (we also showcased smart contract coding for these two blockchains on our Hackathon with Microsoft and Zühlke).

We are currently enhancing our smart contract generation and integration towards other protocols:

• Rootstock (RSK): A very interesting approach, as Rootstock is bringing smart contracts to the bitcoin blockchain! The smart contract language is based on Solidity (the one that’s used for Ethereum), so for us it is a straight forward approach to integrate and test it to have a complete new blockchain integrated!
• EOS: Using Graphene technology, EOS enables users to handle a significant amount of transactions. That, and a delegated proof of stake approach leads to a great scaling potential for commercial usage!
  From a technical perspective, EOS.IO uses C/C++ coding that gets compiled into “WebAssemblies”. The application strcuture is designed around “events” that respond to “actions”. This model fits our internal representation of business workflows very well and we have succesfully doing first adoption cases here.
• NEO: NEO (like Ethereum) uses a virtual machine to execute its smart contracts. From a technical perspective, NEO offers the possibility to use several high-level programming languages like C#, VB.Net and Java to develop smart contracts. The first compiler for NEO Smart Contracts 2.0 will be for MSIL (“Microsoft intermediate language”) — so with our long term Microsoft .NET development experience, it’s a natural fit to implement NEO with our smart contracts generation, too.
• Microsoft Cryptlets and NEM: We name those here as examples for the design idea of getting “load” (data/programming code) off-blockchain. The intention is to securly hash the off-chain load within the blockchain to gain a big boost in efficieny and enable big data being connected to the blockchain world. We did some deep research here and have started first implementations as well.

The great thing about the Unibright framework is that it not only integrates technical systems. It also integrates blockchains and the communites around them. For us a new blockchain protocol is not a competitor — it is first and foremost an opportunity to widen the audience and possibilities for enterprises to make use of blockchain technology.